“What’s on the earth is in the stars; and what’s in the stars is on the earth”: Lakota Relationships with the Stars and American Relationships with the Apocalypse

How is colonialism connected to American relationships with extraterrestrial beings? This commentary analyzes contemporary and founding US mythologies as constant, calculated attempts for settlers to obtain indigeneity in this land stemming from a fear of the “unknown.” From Columbus’s arrival to the Boston Tea Party, from alien and UFO fervor to paranormal experiences, spiritualism, New Age, and American Wicca, American mythology endlessly recreates conspiracy theories to justify its insatiable desire for resource extraction. I examine the US American mythology of extraterrestrials from two directions: the Oglala Lakota perspective of spirits born through a constellation of stars, and the “American” perspective of extraterrestrials born out of settler futurities. Manifest Destiny goes so far as to take ownership over time and reconfigure it into a linear, one-way street that is a progression towards apocalypse. For American Indians and other peoples targeted by the United States government, conspiracy theories prove true. Those who are targeted, Native and otherwise, understand as the violence of American mythology pours across the continent—abduction and assimilation, or death. How can Indigenous nonhuman ontologies orient settler ethics for the future?

Lakota Female Scholarship: A Collective Case Study on Transcending Indigenous Educational Pathways and Persistence at the Graduate Level

This study explored the perspectives of seven Lakota females who graduated from Oglala Lakota College (OLC) master’s degree in Lakota Leadership and Management or Lakota Leadership and Management with an emphasis in Education Administration programs. Education histories, cultural identification, and college experiences were evaluated to investigate what incentives, not only influenced but propelled the women through the world of academia. The research was qualitative in nature, thus giving a thorough examination of each student perspective. The qualitative research was conducted through a collective case study. Four themes identified through in the findings were: financial support, high female influence, cultural identification, and formal versus informal supports.

From Wounded Knee to Sacred Circles: Oglala Lakota Ethos as “Haunt” and “Wound”

Oglala Lakota ethos manifests a pre-Socratic/Heideggerian variant of ethos: ethos as “haunt”. Within this alternative to the Aristotelian ethos-as-character, Oglala ethos marks out the “dwelling place” of the Oglala Lakota people. That is, the Oglala Lakota ground their cultural- and self-identity in the land: their ethology, in effect, expresses an ecology. Thus, an Oglala Lakotan ethos cannot be understood apart from its nation’s understanding of the natural world—of its primacy and sacredness. A further aspect of the Oglala Lakotan ethos rests in the nation’s history of conflict with EuroAmericans. Through military conflict, forced displacement, and material/economic exploitation of reservation lands, an Oglala Lakota ethos bears within itself a woundedness that continues to this day. Only through an understanding of ethos-as-haunt, of cultural trauma or woundedness, and of the ways of healing can Oglala Lakota ethos be fully appreciated.

Perspectives

This chapter considers the aesthetics of western reservations and the so-called “Indian Wars” of the later nineteenth century. In the post-Civil War decades of US national expansion, print media promulgated a range of damaging narratives about savage, vengeful Indian warriors from a distant perspective. Meanwhile, Native artists and authors including Amos Bad Heart Bull (Oglala Lakota) and Charles Alexander Eastman (Mdewakanton Dakota) experimented with perspective and perception in image and text to make visible the many, diverse Native sites and forms of creative knowledge production inaccessible in print media. Their texts call for a model of reading that links the sensational battles of this period with histories of Indigenous representational practice well versed in stories and images of battle. Their works draw surprising connections between a variety of events, spaces, communities, and forms in a period known for the compartmentalization of Indian nations and lands, demonstrating that locally grounded aesthetic analysis remains important to understanding networks of Indian representation in more modern periods.

Engaging Acrimony: Performing Lakota Basketball in South Dakota

The Oglala Lakota basketball teams of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation are one of the most competitive programs in the state of South Dakota. They are, however, competing for state honors in one of the most racist climates in the country. My ethnographic study looks at how the Lakota navigate these perilous waters. Using Turner’s view of performance; and Scott’s theories of cultural resistance, I have characterized Lakota basketball as ‘engaged acrimony.’ Teams representing subaltern communities may use sport to carve out spheres of resistance that force those socially more power communities to grudgingly acknowledge the momentary reversal of the social order. Additionally, in these symbolic victories the Lakota craft narratives of victory that fuel cultural pride and further their resolve to withstand the racist climate they live in.

Indigenous cryptocurrency: Affective capitalism and rhetorics of sovereignty

Financial technologies embody and shape notions of social, as well as financial, worth. New digital ‘alt-finance’ systems, including the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies,’ are no exception: technology, rhetoric, imagined users and non-users, and a long history of sociotechnical, political, and cultural relations are all elements in a dynamic assemblage with wide-ranging consequences. This paper examines the rise and fall of one alt-finance system: MazaCoin, a Bitcoin variant intended to benefit the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The story of MazaCoin is one of an attempt to unite two apparently divergent sociotechnical assemblages: (1) a libertarian, elite technology of cryptocurrency, and (2) a richly traditional indigenous community with a deep desire for cultural survivance, bound up in a precarious economy left behind in the wake of more than a century of genocide.